


Sticks and Stones

by Trash



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: Disabilities, Gen, Written in 2008, car crash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 22:18:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3745432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will always escape me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sticks and Stones

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://graffitidec-fic.livejournal.com/91895.html#cutid1)

My therapist, he tells me not to think of the past, but to look to the future and all the things I can be. But to be honest, my brain is too full of words synonymous with ‘cripple’ for anything remotely optimistic to fit in there. I guess that’s why Brad won’t let me go home alone, why he has set up camp in my guest room. Some tiny part of my brain is telling me that he’s here to humiliate me but even in my state of total self pity I know that isn’t the truth.

The way things used to be, I didn’t have my bedroom downstairs and I wasn’t always being talked at about stair lifts and baths with doors on for easy access. The way things used to be, I could do the splits three different ways and no-hand back-flips. I could do things with my body that gymnasts trained for years to learn. I used to be able to do some breath taking things including, like, being able to go to the bathroom by myself.

I used to be pee shy, but now taking a dump in front of people doesn’t phase me. That is what my life has come down to.

Only it hasn’t. I just think Brad would appreciate having to help me up off the john even less if I was crying with embarrassment all over him.

What happened is I had my whole life ahead of me, and I was going to enrol in a performing arts college. Until I wasn’t. Until I was crushed between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat of my car, my legs all numb and turned into nothing but splintered bone piercing skin and blood, blood, blood everywhere. 

They had to use the jaws of life. A name which I find ironic, since right now I wish they’d left me to die.

The other guy, he didn’t make it. Karma, I guess, since he was drunk. A wife beater too, the cops assured me. This whole thing couldn’t have happened to a better guy. Oh, and they gave me their deepest sympathies and all that bullshit.

When I got home from the hospital Brad pushed all the furniture in my living room up against the walls and transformed what was once my study into my bedroom. He started looking into disabled access kitchens one minute then reassuring me I’d walk again the next.

Let’s not pretend for one second I’m not going to be sitting on my ass for life. 

But my feet, there’s still this phantom twitch whenever I hear music. Muscle memory has me closing my eyes and in my minds eye I’m out of the chair and I’m on my feet, popping and locking and being anything other than broken.

It’s early, and I know Brad won’t be awake for another hour or so. I lay still for as long as I can but eventually I can’t take it and roll onto my side awkwardly. I pull myself to sit up and pull my chair around to face me. I shimmy until I have my back to it. It should be simple, I just lift myself into the thing.

But when I do the pressure pushes it away from me and I can’t catch myself, my legs flailing useless and dead in front of me as I fall off the bed, my head smacking off the floor with a dull thud.

This hurts. I wish the pain would spread, past my back and down through my hips, down through my legs to my knees to my ankles. I wish my toes would curl in agony.

They don’t.

And when Brad finds me crying on my bedroom floor an hour later, it’s not even the pain I’m crying about anymore.

***

“There’s this thing, it’s like a sling, and it helps you in and out of bed.”

I look at him over my mug of coffee. He’s reading some magazine, some catalogue of things that would help me live independently if only I’d admit I needed them. I lower my eyes and stare into my mug. Brad makes a shitty cup of coffee, but I don’t really have the right to complain.

“I wish you wouldn’t get sour with me,” he says and for the first time in weeks I realise how tired he sounds. “I’m only trying to help.”

“I know.” I do know. I appreciate it. But most days I’m so busy wishing I was dead that I don’t have time to say thank you.

“Yeah,” Brad says, but his voice sounds like every word synonymous with ‘disappointed’. 

I put my mug down and stare outside. “I want to go to the beach,” I say, “But I can’t with the chair. I want to go out and get totally blasted. But I can’t. I know you said you hate the word, but what else is there to describe me now but ‘disabled’?”

I don’t mean to be so negative. I was always a positive person before all this. But I just keep thinking, who is going to love me now?

Definitely not Brad. Brad who, if I’d had my hands positioned lower on the steering wheel, would have to wipe my ass. Brad who knew for years that I was harbouring a disgustingly big crush on him but never said anything to me about it. Probably he’s only here because he feels guilty. 

I wish I could tell him how lonely I feel.

“You’re not disabled,” Brad says, one arm stretching across the table to take my hand, “that’s not how this is. And this isn’t forever, you know? You heard the doctors.”

I wish I could tell him that this is forever. 

But there’s nothing I can say.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, you know. But words will always escape me.


End file.
